


With No Colours on Our Skin

by squanderbird



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, angstastic, pairing is heavily implied and heavily implied only, references to warfare, sorry guys but these boys wouldn't play ball rn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:23:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squanderbird/pseuds/squanderbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no trees on their street in Brooklyn; it just isn't that sort of place. Steve knows the leaves are falling anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With No Colours on Our Skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [copperiisulfate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperiisulfate/gifts).



There are no trees on their street in Brooklyn; it just isn't that sort of place. Steve knows the leaves are falling anyway. It's something you know without having to look. He turns his eyes down as he walks home, past the propaganda posters which mock him from the subway walls. 

He has kept every single one of his failed draft cards in a box underneath his bed, held shut with brown parcel tape; a Pandora's Box for the twentieth century, for a generation grown up on not enough but the enduring glitter of war abroad. "Burn them," Bucky suggested once, but Steve can't find it in himself to hold the lighter close enough. There are men, survivors of the last European chaos, who shudder and cannot stand the noise of cars, but they are drowned out in the outrage of a nation as the smoke clears from a harbour. Steve grew up on that not enough. Steve is still not enough. 

"I'm not going for the war just yet," Bucky had reassured him the day they stood silently outside the picture house, memories tangled up with the newsreel wreckage on the screen beyond the box office. 

"Oh," Steve says, and thinks _but you will_. It's a matter of time. It's a matter of waiting for the leaves to fall. 

Bucky's eyes, quick and animate, flicker over to meet Steve's in the window's reflection for a moment, and then he elbows him. "Can't leave you by yourself for five minutes else you're being a punchbag. Can't leave you by yourself, now can I?" 

"Imagine the girls you'll get with that uniform, though," Steve manages, and Bucky's laugh is outright, joyous, raucous and - as always - makes him feel positively glass-like in comparison. 

*

They walk in the park at night. It's not safe, no sir, but Bucky's strong in his uniform and Steve's learnt how to run like the devil's panting for his soul. It's not respectable, but this thing that's come between them isn't respectable either. Steve isn't sure how it happened, only that they're youth-drunk reckless, that Bucky's time here is spilling away like an hourglass, that Bucky's going to go and they're going to give him a gun and Steve will be stuck here at home - like his girl, like his widow - no, not his widow, Bucky's too damn stubborn to die - and he can't stand it. 

Bucky's peacoat is draped around Steve's shoulders. The lining smells like sweat and carbolic soap. They don't talk about this; not because they don't want to, but because there's simply nothing to talk about. 

The mulch of dead leaves squelches underfoot. There's a hole in the heel of Steve's boot, enough that the damp seeps in. The air, once inhaled, spikes in the lungs with cold. There is almost a suggestion of frost. There aren't stars that you can see here, but you can paint them in if you close your eyes. Steve doesn't close his eyes.

"It's not winter yet," Steve says, a little desperate. It's a fool's game; they both know men's orders are pouring in now, that before the week's out there'll be an official envelope on the Barnes' old doormat. Bucky's eyes soften. He leans forward and taps his fingers on Steve's mouth lightly, lightly, enough to be denied. Steve holds his breath. 

"It's not winter yet," Bucky agrees and ruffles Steve's hair like they're still children. They start walking again. Steve bumps their shoulders together companionably. 

Neither of them talk about the future. It's not that they don't want to, it's that they _can't_.


End file.
